South Korea’s Han Kang wins Nobel for ‘intense poetic prose’

South Korean author Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for what the Nobel committee called ‘her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’. Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised Han’s ‘physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives’ of her characters.

“She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style, has become an innovator in contemporary prose,” Olsson said.

Nobel literature committee member Anna-Karin Palm said, “Han writes intense lyrical prose that is both tender and brutal, and sometimes slightly surrealistic as well.” Han, 53, becomes the first Asian woman and the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize.

Han wins the Nobel at a time of growing global influence of South Korean culture, which in recent years has included the success of films like director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning ‘Parasite’.

Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for ‘The Vegetarian’, an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its 119 laureates until this year’s award. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.

Tender, innovative

Han made her publishing debut as poet in 1993; her first short story collection was published the following year and her first novel, ‘Black Deer’, in 1998. Works translated into English include ‘The White Book’, a poetic novel that draws on the death of Han’s older sister shortly after birth.